A different way of looking at the Lord's world

Human Fossils –where are they?

What happened to all the people who were not on board Noah’s Ark? People challenge biblical creationists with comments along the lines of, “I believe God created, and I don’t believe in evolution, but He could have taken billions of years, so what’s the big deal about the age of the earth?” Some claim that an emphasis on ‘6 literal days, 6,000 years ago’ even keeps people away from the faith. It might come as a surprise that I have a tendency to agree. The timescale in and of itself actually is not the important issue. The point is the issue ultimately comes down to, “Does the Bible actually mean what it plainly says?” It therefore goes to the heart of the trustworthiness of Scripture. I have produced several articles already that deal with the actual scripture and the interpretation of the scripture to counter the arguments of most secular or atheistic believers. https://iamnotanatheist.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/biblical-interpretation/ and https://iamnotanatheist.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/creation-and-logic/ .

This article will deal not with scripture, but with scripture proving that evolutionary scientists have some explanations to make about geologic facts that the biblical scientists can easily explain. If there were many millions of people populating the earth at the time of the Flood, would not many of those people have been buried in the Flood sediments? So why do we not find hundreds or even thousands of human fossils in the rock layers regarded as Flood sediments. If we believe in Scripture, then from our understanding of the Flood, we should expect to find human fossils in Flood strata. Therefore, it seems somewhat confusing that we do not find any. There must be an obvious explanation for this lack of human fossils. To explore the reason for this, we will delve into geology, paleontology, archeology and the history of our planet.

The concept of long age’s dates back to 1830 and Charles Lyell[i] who released his book Principles of Geology. He stated that one of his aims was “To free the science [of geology] from Moses.” He built his ideas upon those of another geologist, James Hutton, who advocated a uniformitarian interpretation of the world’s geology. Lyell argued that the thousands of feet of sedimentary layers (laid down by water or some other moving fluid) all over the earth were the result of long, slow, gradual processes over millions or billions of years (instead of the processes of Noah’s Flood). He believed that processes observed in the present must be used to explain the geological history of the earth. This ‘present is the key to the past’ assumption (and its variants) is a cornerstone of modern geology. It involves a rejection of the biblical account of a global watery cataclysm. The millions of years assigned to the various layers in the ‘geological column’ were adopted long before the advent of radiometric dating methods

The secular geologic column goes like this. Not that this is one of the few that includes plants.

The theological problem comes from the fact that those rock layers do not just have rocks or granules in them. They contain fossils that are indisputable in the evidence of death—and not just of death, but carnivore, disease and suffering. There are remains that have tooth marks in them, and even animals fossilized in the process of eating other animals. There is evidence of disease, cancers, and infection; and general suffering from wounds, broken bones, etc. Biblically, we understand these things only began to happen after the Fall.

The implication of long-age belief is that God ordained death before the Fall of man, but the Bible clearly states that it was Adam’s actions that brought death into the world (Romans 5:12 ‘Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned’). Evolution is a random and wasteful process that requires millions of ‘unfit’ organisms to die (if they had developed at all in the first place). Countless transitional forms would have arisen, only to fall as casualties in the great march ‘forward’ because they were not the mutational correct version to survive whatever change was necessary at that time.

There are some claims and reports of human artifacts and remains in rock layers that are clearly part of the Flood sediments. However, many of these claims are not adequately documented in any scientific sense, while those few reports that have appeared in the scientific and related literature remain open to question or other interpretations. Now, I already know what the skeptics out there are saying, “Yea, they just discredit what they don’t want by picking and choosing.” Well not quite, if when using the scientific method and you have presented evidence by lay scientists claiming to have found human artifacts or fossils and have not recorded specific location details, so that other scientists investigating the claims end up having difficulty finding the location from which the sample in question came- you have a problem. In addition, if lay scientists have in the past not kept some of the rock that enclosed the fossil or artifact as proof of its in situ occurrence-you have a problem. These two oversights have often made it next to impossible to reconstruct and/or prove where fossils or artifacts have came from, rendering such finds virtually useless.

Should genuine human fossils or artifacts from the time of Noah’s Flood be found, then it is mandatory that proper scientific procedures be followed to document the geological context, in order to guarantee that the scientific significance of such a find is unequivocally demonstrated. If there were millions of individuals on the earth either prior to the Flood or during the long evolutionary period – where are the fossils? There should be millions of fossils when all mammals except those on the Ark, were wiped out, or over millions of years all of the mammals died from starvation, predation or some kind of accident and possibly even old age. Where are they?

Let us begin by considering the nature of the fossil record. Most people do not realize that in terms of numbers of fossils, 95% of the fossil record consists of shallow marine organisms such as corals and shellfish.[ii] Within the remaining 5%, 95% are all the algae and plant/tree fossils, including the vegetation that now makes up the trillions of tons of coal, and all the other invertebrate fossils including the insects. Thus the vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) together make up very little of the fossil record—in fact, 5% of 5%, which is a mere 0.25% of the entire fossil record. Comparatively speaking there are very, very few amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal fossils. However, those are what are talked about the most.

In any regional area where vertebrate fossils are found, there is a general tendency for these land animals to be higher up in the rock strata sequence on top of the strata containing marine organisms. This has been interpreted by evolutionists, as representing the evolutionary sequence of life from marine invertebrates, through fish and amphibians to the land-based vertebrates. This same observation can be reasonably explained by Flood geologists due to the order of burial of the different ecological zones of organisms by the Flood waters.

Another factor to be considered is the different mobility of humans in various locations and many land-dwelling animals with a variety of skills in locomotion. Compare them to much of the abundant marine life, such as corals, barnacles and shellfish for which we have an abundance of fossils. . When the Flood began, the rising Floodwaters would probably have encouraged humans and mobile land animals to quickly move from low-lying areas to higher ground.

Is it possible that people would still be alive when the Floodwaters finally covered all the land? Would the people and animals be swept away and be buried and preserved as fossils in the later Flood sediments? Can we assume that there was no destruction of the people’s bodies in the Floodwaters and by other processes operating during the Flood and subsequently? I doubt it! Not only would the turbulence of the sediment-laden Floodwaters probably destroy some of the human bodies swept away, but differential suspension in the waters could have made it hard to bury those bodies that survived the turbulence. This is because human bodies when immersed in water tend to bloat, and therefore become lighter and float to the surface. We have many instances of massive amounts of dead fish (for unknown reasons) floating on the water’s surface and being piled up on shores by the waves.

The human bodies floating on the water surface would then be carrion for whatever birds were still flying and seeking places to land and food to eat. Likewise, marine carnivores still alive in their watery habitat would also devour corpses. If the bodies floated long enough and were not eaten as carrion, they could still either decomposed or be beaten to destruction on and in the waters before any sediment burial could take place.

When we consider all possible factors, it would seem unlikely that many of the humans present at the time the Floodwaters came could have ended up being fossilized. Even if a few thousand, were preserved, when such a small number is distributed across the surface of the earth (after the flood receded, the chances of one being found at the surface are mathematically insignificant, and of one being found by a professional scientist who could recognize its significance and document it properly even less.

This is the prequel to my treatise on how I became a young-age biblical theorist. I have come to believe that the world is, according to the Biblical genealogy, only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. I leave some wiggle room for the possibility of the long age of many of the individuals listed may be off. In addition, we do not know if the person was 350 years old or 350 years and 11 months old. Even the most ardent supporters of the Biblical genealogy state that there are several discrepancies. It is, in effect, inconsequential when compared to the so-called millions of years claimed by Darwinian evolutionists and the 50-100 million-year fluctuations they constantly give for the different dates in their chronology.

[i] His scientific contributions included an explanation of earthquakes, the theory of gradual “backed up-building” of volcanoes, and in stratigraphy the division of the Tertiary period into the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene. He also coined the currently-used names for geological eras, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic.

[ii] Wise, K.P., ‘The Flood and the fossil record’, an informal talk given at the Institute for Creation Research, San Diego (USA) on August 17, 1988